Alternative Modernities in French Travel Writing

Gillian Jein

Description

Examining the aesthetics and politics at stake in French urban travel writing as spatial practice in London and New York

Ever since human beings first travelled, cities have constituted important material and literary destinations. While the city has formed a key theme for scholars of literary fiction, travellers’ writings on the western city have been somewhat neglected by travel studies. However, travel writing with its attention to difference provides a rich source for the study of representational strategies and tactics in modern urban space.

Beginning at the Crystal Palace in 1851 and ending up in the skyscrapers of NYC, this book analyses the writings of lesser-known as well as canonical French travel writers, including Paul Morand, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Perec and Jean Baudrillard. Tracing the work of these writers in London and New York from 1851 to the 1980s, it contributes to a body of work that analyses travel and travel writing beyond the Anglophone context, and engages in questions pertaining to the French imagination of possible meanings for life in the modern city. One of the central tenets of the book is that, in the way its spaces are planned, encountered and represented, the city is active in formulating identities, while the book’s guiding question is how analysis of French travel writing allows us to explore the multiplicity of urban modernities by engaging with the historical and cultural differences internal to ‘the West’.

Bringing together the strands of theory, context and poetic analysis, the book treats of travel writing as a spatial practice, one that engages representations of urban space in questions of nationality, power and legibility. In this way, it opens avenues for the exploration of urban modernity from a position of alterity, whereby alternative imaginative geographies of the city come into view.

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Producing the City; 2. Urban Oppositions: The French in Nineteenth-Century London; 3. Revealing and Reconstructing London; 4. Wandering Geometry: Order and Identity in New York; 5. Writing around the Lines: Interpretive Travel Writing; Conclusion; References; Index

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 19 juin 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783085156
• Langue: English

Extrait

Alternative Modernities in French Travel Writing
Anthem Studies in Travel
Anthem Studies in Travel publishes new and pioneering work in the burgeoning field of travel studies. Titles in this series engage with questions of travel, travel writing, literature and history, and encompass some of the most exciting current scholarship in a variety of disciplines. Proposals for monographs and collections of essays may focus on research representing a broad range of geographical zones and historical contexts. All critical approaches are welcome, although a key feature of books published in the series will be their potential interest to a wide readership, as well as their originality and potential to break new ground in research.
Series Editor
Charles Forsdick - University of Liverpool, UK
Editorial Board
Mary Baine Campbell - Brandeis University, USA
Steve Clark - University of Tokyo, Japan
Claire Lindsay - University College London, UK
Loredana Polezzi - University of Warwick, UK
Paul Smethurst - University of Hong Kong, China
Alternative Modernities in French Travel Writing
Engaging Urban Space in London and New York, 1851-1986
Gillian Jein
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2016
by ANTHEM PRESS
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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
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Copyright Gillian Jein 2016
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jein, Gillian, 1978-
Title: Alternative modernities in French travel writing : engaging urban space in London and New York, 1851-1986 / Gillian Jein.
Description: London, UK : Anthem Press, an imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003916| ISBN 9781783085125 (hardback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 1783085126 (hardback : alkaline paper)
Subjects: LCSH: French-Travel-England-London-History. |
French - Travel - New York (State) - New York - History. | Travel writers - France - History. | Travelers writings, French - History and criticism. | City and town life - England - London - History. | City and town life - New York (State) - New York - History. | Spatial behavior - Social aspects - England - London - History. | Spatial behavior - Social aspects - New York (State) - New York - History. | Public spaces - Social aspects - England - London - History. | Public spaces - Social aspects - New York (State) - New York - History.
Classification: LCC DA676.9.F74 J45 2016 | DDC 914.2104/8-dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003916
ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 512 5 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1 78308 512 6 (Hbk)
Sketch of New York (1930) by Paul Morand.
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Approaching the City
Crossings
Questions of Interpretation
Urban Spaces in Travel Studies
The Politics of Poetics
Alternative Modernities
Expectations, Chapter Outlines
Chapter One Producing the City
1.1 Practising Place
1.2 Meaning-Making in the Urban Environment
1.3 Representations of Space I: The ‘Figured City’
1.4 Representations of Space II: Constructing Cultural Codes in Architecture
1.5 Representational Spaces: From the ‘Figured City’ to the Lives of Spaces
1.6 Travel as Spatial Practice
1.6.1 The Inhabitant
1.6.2 Travel and the Traveller
1.7 Reading the City
1.7.1 The Pilgrim
1.7.2 The Educationalist
1.7.3 The Tourist
1.7.4 The Nomad
1.8 Representational Space, Writing the City
1.8.1 Issues of Genre and Modes of Representation
1.8.2 Fiction
1.8.3 Literary Presence
1.8.4 Autobiography
1.8.5 Ethnography
1.8.6 Legislative and Interpretive Modes of Travel
Chapter Two Urban Oppositions: Producing French Space in Nineteenth-Century London
2.1 Modern Babylon
2.2 French Travel Writing and Modernity
2.3 Jules Janin’s Glass Palace
2.4 A Worthwhile Revolution
2.5 An English Pilgrimage to a French Past
2.6 Avoiding the Everyday
2.7 Jules Vallès’s Topographies of Exile
2.8 Outcast London
2.9 The Great Maw
Chapter Three Revealing and Reconstructing London
3.1 The Secret City: Authentic Spaces and Dark Tourism
3.2 The Guide
3.3 Dark Tourism and Language
3.4 Carceral Spaces and Transparency
3.5 Spaces of Quietude: Leroy’s Forgotten London
3.6 Reconstructing London
Chapter Four Wandering Geometry: Order and Identity in New York
4.1 Reading the Grid
4.2 Morand’s Guide to Modernity
4.3 The Order of Things
4.4 Framing America: Sartre in New York
4.5 Fragile Homes, Mobile Identities
4.6 Wandering Geometry: Located and Lost
Chapter Five Writing around the Lines: Interpretive Travel Writing
5.1 Georges Perec on Ellis Island
5.2 Monuments and Non-places
5.3 Writing Potential Memory
5.4 Interpretive Travel and Ethical Spaces: Jean Baudrillard’s America
5.5 The Ethics of Form
5.6 Without Grounds
5.7 The Perfect Crime
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the generous support of Trinity College, Dublin, and the Ussher fellowship, which allowed me to undertake the doctoral thesis from which the monograph eventually derived. I would like to express my warmest gratitude to David Scott, for his inspiring supervision during that period, his love of cities and of travel, and for his support throughout the project s nascent stages. Johnnie Gratton and Jean-Xavier Ridon made constructive suggestions with regard to publication. Bill Marshall extended his enduring support, open-hearted advice and conversation, and still encourages me to think on a broader horizon . The publishers at Anthem Press, and Brian Stone especially, are owed special mention for their patience, understanding and personalized support in helping me see this project through to its end. Others have been involved in helping me retain (some) sanity throughout the years of this book s development: Yvonne-Marie Rogez, Alison Kapor, Greg Kerr, Daisy Connon and my brother Karl all provided friendship and heart. I want to express gratitude to Heather Mallory for her intellectual passion, warmth and for allowing me to use her wonderful Manhattan apartment; Carmel Mangan for her kindness and hospitality on Long Island; Barbara and Huw Thomas for their generosity in London; my parents for their enduring wisdom, love and encouragement; and Linda Knowles for her comradeship and our meanders through Paris, London and Dublin.
Finally, Ronan Devlin deserves more thanks than can ever be expressed here. This book is dedicated to our daughter, Robin, who, I hope, will one day walk these cities with us.
INTRODUCTION: APPROACHING THE CITY
Each city is made of meetings, of contacts and of exchanges. Each city is made of chance and organization, of orders and disorders, of chaos and reorganization in an imperceptible flux of internal mutations. Each city is a complex organism. 1
Chamoiseau 2002, 16
Every story is a travel story - a spatial practice. For this reason, spatial practices concern everyday tactics, are part of them [ ]. These narrated adventures, simultaneously producing geographies of actions and drifting into commonplaces of an order, do not merely constitute a supplement to pedestrian enunciations and rhetorics. They are not satisfied with displacing the latter and transposing them into the field of language. In reality, they organize walks. They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it. 2
Certeau [1980] 1984, 115-16
Long before the age of the megalopolis, movement has defined cities. As complex constellations of people, objects and signs, cities are spaces where social, political and historical relations undergo constant negotiation and where the realities and representations of urban life are in persistent and dynamic states of becoming. This is to say that each person s experience of the city organizes an intricately shifting site for the production and exchange of meaning. Simply walking through the streets - choosing a particular path to follow, avoiding certain others - involves many acts of interpretation and mediation, ways of practising urban space that the average urban dweller undertakes everyday, often without a second thought (Certeau [1980] 1990). As the most complex human appropriation of the natural landscape, cities are remarkable for their mobile entanglement of bodies and objects and for the peripatetic production of meanings around such entanglements (Madsen and Plunz 2002). What happens, however, when we begin to reflect on these movements of and through a city? How do we position ourselves - historically, spatially, subjectively -